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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice : 2 (out of 10)

Summary: it's terrible. Don't see it.

It's almost hard to believe that Batman v Superman is so bad a movie as it
turned out to be. Sure, the trailers were bad, the early reports were awful,
and the reviews have been apocalyptic; but the cast was strong, the budget
was more than adequate, and Zack Snyder has proven capable of at least basic
mediocrity in the past. Unfortunately, Snyder managed to make his worst film
yet.

The plot fits into three major stories: a Superman movie involving Lex Luthor
and a personal crisis of faith based on how the world perceives him; a Batman
origin movie asking how far he will go to protect his world when the rules
change; and a superhero-vs-monster summer blockbuster tent-pole. None of these
plots were unworkable, but none were given a chance to breathe; rather, these
plots were tossed into a blender, parts scooped out more-or-less randomly,
and placed into sequential order, plus or minus a few dream sequences. What
comes out is tonally, thematically, and (oddly) visually inconsistent and
jittery. It just plain doesn't fit together; the stories undermine each other,
the protagonists never have a chance to do anything but react, and we're never
given a chance to even think about what's going on.

The actors are mostly acceptable. Ben Affleck plays an okay Batman and a
pretty-good Bruce Wayne; Henry Cavill is still a perfectly acceptable Superman;
Gal Gadot is given little enough characterization to make her kick-ass moments,
well, kick ass; Amy Adams may have had her character become a victim, but she
at least tries to make something of her role; and Jesse Eisenberg, well, his
Lex Luthor is a frigging embarrassment, but that's mostly the writing's fault,
at least he tried. As for the secondary cast, well, they don't get enough
screen time to be relevant, so it's best not to worry much about poor Laurence
Fishburne or Holly Hunter.

The visuals were in large part based on The Dark Knight Returns, which is
iconic for a reason; and much of the time they were at least workable, if not
inspired. There was one Batman fight scene that reminded me of the Arkham
Asylum series of video games, which was worth something; and the otherworldly
movements of Superman were eerie and messianic in an impressive way. But the
fight scenes were pretty much terrible, in the same way as in Man of Steel,
where the only real way that we can keep track of who's winning a fight is with
hit point bars.

Some good points: well, they showed the Captain America trailer before the
movie, does that count? I liked Alfred. Oh, and LEGO Batman looks cool.

Some bad points:

The timeline didn't work, in a rather lazy fashion. We had things
like there being time for a congressional hearing before Superman was
able to return from an African nation, or weeks of Superman "lost in the
wilderness" while nothing else happens at all. I don't like it when things
go too fast and too slow.

The "Superman as Jesus vs Devil" thing was clearly the focus of a lot of
discussion, but Snyder failed to actually come to any conclusions about
it except that it made for the occasional interesting visual. Take a side,
man!

There's a part in the movie where we watch Youtube videos introducing other
DC Universe superheroes. They were vaguely interesting, but were handled
terribly. I think that they would have made a good DVD special feature;
instead, they were tossed into an already-too-long film, breaking what
flow we had finally managed to put together.

Some more bad points: there was a lot of casual cruelty for a movie marketed
at children. Snyder managed to make Batman into both a passive puppet and a
cruel torturer and murderer. Holly Hunter made up the entirety of Congress.
Neil Degrasse Tyson put his face in this movie on purpose. Nobody knows how to
flee from an apocalypse. After spending the whole movie complaining about the
property damage done to Metropolis in the first movie, we end up doing more
property damage in this movie.

breathe

Snyder killed a major Superman character in the first 10 minutes of the movie
just to show off how "gritty" he could be. Batman is a terrible detective.
The Daily Planet gets its news from CNN. The government just gives Lex
Luthor the body of General Zod from the first movie; and Kryptonian security is
a joke. They didn't even bother to explain why Lex Luthor is insane.

breathe again

There were ~6 endings and ~3 beginnings. Too many dream sequences. Lex's plot
was about 3x more complicated than necessary. That network tap. Why didn't
Wonder Woman get to do more? And...

Okay, I should stop.

Rating: 2/10 (* 1/2 out of 4); I think I've managed to avoid seeing any worse
superhero movies to date, and hopefully this will help remind me in the future.

Lucy: 3 out of 10

The trailer for Lucy that came out a few months ago was fun, at least
the first time I saw it. The action looked sharp and stylish, the story
seemed cheerfully bare-bones and perfunctory, and Luc Besson's direction
and Scarlett Johansson's acting are generally joys to watch. The main
downside was the focus on the "humans use only 10% of the human brain"
myth, which grated like nails on a chalkboard; but I could still get
behind it, if only that part was only being played up in the trailers.

Sadly, the trailer was not exaggerating. The movie really, truly commits
to the 10% thing, and extrapolates it all the way up to transcendence
and transubstantiation. And this plot contrivance undermines the story,
with the story undermining the plot as well. All we're left with is some
occasional nice action scenes and some good acting by Scarlet Johansson.

The general plot of the movie: Lucy (Johansson) is turned into an
unwitting drug mule for an experimental drug. When the bag of drugs is
broken while still inside of her, she gets super powers and starts to
transcend. While mourning the loss of her humanity, she then tries to
get more of the drug so that she can further transcend. Also, there are
bad guys that are generally good at blowing things up that act as mere
annoyances to Lucy. Lucy succeeds at transcending. Cue 2001 space
baby.

To me, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable plot to an animated movie
with about ten lines of subtitled dialogue. There's no real need to
explain what's going on here, and any explanation will by necessity cut
into the trippiness of the high concept by forcing us to answer questions
that we shouldn't have needed to articulate in the first place.

Unfortunately, Besson wanted to focus on that explanation. As such,
he cast Morgan Freeman as a professor that specializes in human brain
studies (psychologist? Biologist? I don't think we were told), and
Freeman proceeds to explain Besson's thesis in detail. Humanity only
uses 10-15% of its brain; dolphins use 20%, and that's how they can do
echo-location; if we used more than that, we would be able to control our
own bodies, the bodies of others, matter, energy, etc, each associated
with a specific 5% mark. This all gets tied into evolution and immortal
cells and information transfer and other pseudo-science.

By casting Freeman, Besson was forced to use him. And so we end up with
the major sub-plot of the film, which involves Lucy coming to Paris to see
him for, err, some reason. This ties into a bunch of other silly premises
involving the other drug mules, the remarkably-determined bad guys, and
something involving Lucy's need for exactly four bags of the drug (no
more, no less), coincidentally the number of bags already shown on screen!

This sub-plot serves to undermine the otherwise-straightforward story.
Conversely, the story undermines the sub-plot, which probably could have
worked out if it wasn't in the service of a trippy action movie.

How about the action? At least some of the individual scenes were pretty
and well-directed in isolation, including Lucy's break-out from captivity,
the car-chase scene, and the start of the Bad Guy's final assault; but
only the first of those scenes really fit into the story, and only the
last one fit into the plot. (The car chase scene could have been excised
from the movie without effecting either one, but it was at least striking!).
But most of the action was fairly forgettable, especially compared to the
trippy scenes happening around the action.

All in all, this whole movie felt half-formed and unfocused. I wish that
Besson had committed to one type of movie or another, so that we might
have ended up with something more interesting than a stylized mess.

Rating: 3 (out of 10)

By the way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_brain_myth

Trailer Thoughts:

The next few months do not look good. The "highlight" trailer was for 50
Shades of Grey, which just looked terrible in all ways. Other listed
movies included November Man, a spy thriller with a former James Bond
protecting a former Bond Girl in a small black dress; Dracula Untold, a
faux-deconstruction of the Dracula origin myth starring Bard the Bowman;
The Judge, attempted Oscar-bait where Iron Man the Evil Defense Attorney
must protect his estranged father (Robert Duval) from charges of vehicular
murder; and No Good Deed, an Idris Elba home invasion movie that sets
off my 'racist' alarm something fierce.

On the other hand, I do want to see Interstellar, because you probably
can't go too wrong with Christopher Nolan doing sci-fi; the hated
trailer-for-going-the-movies was for Guardians of the Galaxy, which
looks like it's going to be lots of fun; and Kingsman: the Secret
Service looks like it may understand the style-above-substance problem
better than Lucy, at least. So the trailers weren't a complete loss
(though I think it's safe to say that eight trailers is too many).

300: Rise of an Empire: 4 out of 10

This just isn't as compelling as the source material.

It is generally silly to dwell on a-historical depictions of history and
historical characters in Hollywood films, especially one adapting an
unreleased graphic novel. But 300: Rise of an Empire is a special case,
dealing as it does with events and characters described by Herodotus, the
Greek 'Father of History'. Where the original 300 took a single event
from his Histories - the Battle of Thermopylae - and adapted it into a
recognizable and broad-strokes-accurate story, this sequel chooses to
adapt the Persian Wars as a whole. And just as in the original 300,
there is a lot to admire when the "true" history of Herodotus shines
through. Unfortunately, this sequel falls short both in accuracy and
artistic value, usually at the expense of the narrative.

Let's start with the opening voice-over, where Lena Headey, as Queen Gorgo
of the Spartans, prophesies that Athens will only be saved by wooden
ships. This actually refers to a prophecy of the Oracle at Delphi, which
foretold that Athens would be saved by its "wooden walls". The people of
Athens originally interpreted this literally, and wanted to expand their
walls to defend against the upcoming attack; but Themistocles, an Athenian
politician and general, encouraged his people to interpret the prophecy as
a metaphor for the Athenian fleet.

The movie's presentation of this prophecy may have the virtue of being
short and sweet, but it kills the story-telling potential of introducing
Themistocles - who turns out to be the protagonist of the story. We don't
hear about his vision for the Athenian navy, or how he had convinced the
Athenians to build their ships over the last decade. Instead, we are
told that he was the Tortured Hero of Marathon ten years before, when he
shot King Darius of Persia (note: this didn't happen). Rather than being
shown a compelling and flawed Athenian historical figure, Themistocles is
turned into a brooding and lifeless Action Hero fighting for democracy and
justice.

Artemisia fares better than Themistocles, but only because her character
was so ahistorical as to make the whole exercise of comparing to
history worthless. The historical Artemisia was the Queen of Caria, a
Greek colony that was under the control of the Persian empire. She was
in fact a naval commander under Xerxes, notable because of her gender
(women really didn't exist in these circles in the 5th century BC) and
because she did stand out at the naval battle at Salamis. Conversely,
Artemisia-the-movie-character (Eva Green) was quite effective in her role
- colorful, bigger than life, and above all memorable - but she wasn't
actually shown as particularly competent in her role as naval commander.
Indeed, the only skills that she showed were a) cutting and stabbing
anybody around her and b) hating Greeks (and, well, everybody else).

The battles themselves - well, at least most of the battles depicted
actually did occur. The depiction of Greek naval warfare was fairly
accurate: triremes would ram and sink each other, and if that failed the
ships would simply be platforms for hand-to-hand combat. Some of the
tactics in the battle of Artemeisium were even fairly accurate. But the
battle of Salamis was shown as a typical Hollywood battle - the plucky
good guys up against unstoppable odds, holding out bravely against the
final onslaught, until unexpected reinforcements arrive to turn the battle
in their favor. This is especially frustrating when the actual point of
the battle was that strategic and tactical planning can turn the tide
against superior numbers - the point, in fact, of the original 300!

And the Spartans - well, let's just say that their depiction in the
original 300 was more complete than this.

For all of that, 300 2 (302?) still delivers on what was expected:
stylized action and gore, excellent storyboards and well-done
cinematography, a scenery-chewing actor (well, actress - Eva Green did by
far the best job in this movie), and a strong dose of shallow jingoism.
Within its own requirements, it's not a terrible movie. I'm just not
sure that I can recommend seeing it.

Rating: 4 (out of 10)

A few other points:

There was a lot of flesh on display, as was probably the point of this
exercise. The Athenians were fairly interchangeable as Big Buff Guys
With Beards, and oh there sure were a lot of them! As for the female
characters, only one that I can recall - Lena Headey - was not topless
at some point during the movie. I'm not sure if this is all overall a
plus or a minus, but it seems worthy of note.

What was the 'rising empire' in the title, anyway? Persia? They only
showed it clashing. Athens? Historically that may be reasonable, but
no focus was offered here. Greece as a whole? Maybe that's what they
were aiming at, but, again, they missed.

I find it frustrating when movies claim to be adaptations of other
media, and that other media doesn't even exist yet. I find it
especially frustrating in this case, because I'd like to see this art!
Frank Miller is an exceptional artist, even if his work has become
especially crazy-in-a-bad-way over the last few years; and given that
the true draw of this movie and the original 300 was the beauty of the
comic book art used as story boards, it's a shame to not have that comic
book art to which to compare.

Trailer Thoughts:

This movie definitely announced the beginning of the Summer Movie Season
with its premiere trailers for Transformers 4 (5/10 - meh, I'll see the
movie but the trailer wasn't great) and Godzilla (9/10 - now, that
is a trailer). Interestingly, much of the focus was on horror movies -
Oculus (6/10 - effective, but far from my style), Deliver Us From Evil
(3/10 - drek, with an evil Angry Bird) - which seemed an odd choice for
connecting to a standard action movie, but I guess that they don't have
that many chances to advertise in front of R-rated movies nowadays.

The weirdest trailer was the red band trailer for Arnold Schwarzanegger's
Sabotage, which focused on the joy of being a red-band trailer rather
than being an actual preview for the movie. There were breasts, several
exploding heads, and an absurd amount of cursing for a 90 second trailer,
and there was no emphasis on story, characters, or plot. Meh. (4/10)

Finally, there was a trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past. I don't
think this trailer is standing up to repeat viewing that well, but I'm
still excited to see the movie, so I guess it's working okay. (6/10)

Ender's Game: 5 out of 10

The commercials for Ender's Game did not impress me. The advertising
campaign focused on two things: on the propaganda surrounding the Formic
War, and the movie's final battle. This focus on space combat was
visually impressive, but were almost besides the point of the source
material; and given that there were plenty of visually impressive pieces
of the source material that could have adequately represented the source
material, my expectation was that the film makers had completely missed
the point.

Luckily, the commercials for Ender's Game do not reflect the movie. In
fact, the movie is a fairly faithful retelling of the book, and many of
its faults lie in that accuracy.

Both the movie and the book focus on Ender Wiggin, a child expressly
born and bred to be a child officer in fleet defending Earth. The story
focuses on Ender fighting his way through the ranks of an orbital Battle
School, the distrust of his peers, and the adult's attempts to control.
This isn't necessarily heady or subtle stuff, but it turns out to be a bit
too complex for a 90 minute movie. Most movies would address this problem
by leaving out less-important parts of the story; Ender's Game addresses
the problem by just giving most of these parts of the story short-shrift.

One simple example: a good portion of the book is spent focusing on
Ender's older siblings Valentine and Peter. The movie has precisely one
short scene with Peter. While this isn't necessarily a huge loss, this
did take time that could have been better spent on establishing other
characters.

Another, and more pressing, example: the most striking part of the book
was the concept of the Battle Room - an open, zero-gravity arena in which
the children battle in army formations to conquer their opponent's gate.
The battles themselves have been fascinating to imagine and to mentally
extend for decades, and the slogan "The Enemy's Gate Is Down" sticks with
me to this day. And I was not disappointed when the movie introduced the
Battle Room or showed us the first battle; but, sadly, the movie didn't
give the Battle Room the time it deserved. Instead we only got three
Battle Room battles, each inexpertly combining together several scenes
from the book. I could have watched a whole movie of nothing but the
Battle Room (Hunger Games 4, perhaps? Or how about a video game?), but
instead we were merely tempted.

Thus disappointed, I spent much of the movie focusing on what the movie
could have been if time had been available to really focus on the parts
that needed focus. I eventually decided that an 8-to-10 part HBO-style
mini-series could have done the movie justice; the book was just episodic
enough to support the material with appropriate A-and-B plots, some of
which would involve and justify both Peter and Valentine.

Still, there was much to praise. The child actors were really quite good,
to the extent that I was willing to forgive that they were all ~4 years
older than the original novel called for. (Well, except for Peter.) The
diversity of the cast was striking. The
special effects were effective. The thematic material was stronger than
I expected, even if it was hurt by the necessary elisions. And the final
space battle was impressive, to the extent that I was not upset that
so much time had been spent on it. And the anti-war and anti-bullying
messages still came through, though not with the same poignancy as the
original book.

To summarize: Ender's Game is not a bad movie, but it is not as good as
it could have been, or perhaps should have been.

Rating: 5 (out of 10)

Trailer thoughts:

Overall, the trailers were quite unfocused, seemingly indicating that the
movie studios didn't quite know what to make of this movie. It was
especially striking that there were no trailers for sci-fi movies.

Vampire Academy: not only does the movie look terrible, but the
trailer was inconsistent and useless. I know I'm not the target
audience for these kinds of things, but still, this is an
embarrassment. I'm sure it will make plenty of money. 2/10

Mr Peabody & Sherman: I am also not the target audience of this
kind of kid's movie, but this at least looked watchable. The trailer
did a fair job of explaining the story (as such) and sampling the
jokes, though not perhaps explaining why we need a full 75 minutes of
this kind of nostalgia. I rather expect to like the Rocky & Bullwinkle
short more. 4/10

Anchorman 2: the trailer itself wasn't particularly well put
together, sadly; it worked on the "string a bunch of jokes together"
principle. Luckily, the jokes looked pretty good, especially the ones
with Steve Carell. I'll probably see this. 6/10

47 Ronin: this movie would look a whole lot less embarrassing if
Keanu Reeves was not involved. It's still visually impressive and
does a good job of being a self-contained story; but I also come out
of seeing this every time feeling like the trailer is actively trying
to deceive me about its movie's contents. 4/10

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: this trailer doesn't really
have a lot of work to do; its target audience is going to see the
movie regardless. As such, this just focuses on vignettes and
visuals, rather than being a stand-alone work on its own (like, say
the first trailer from the first Hobbit movie, with its focus on
the Dwarven song). 6/10

I, Frankenstein: the movie looks horrible and fun to watch, and
there's a pretty good chance that the trailer is going to be more fun
than the movie itself. Over-the-top gothic fantasy horror may well be
a hoot; if I see this movie, it'll almost certainly be because of the
implied craziness of trailers like this. 7/10

Riddick: 6 out of 10

I barely remember Pitch Black or The Chronicles of Riddick, but
those few remaining memories are fairly fond ones. Both movies were
entertaining and better than expected, the first one in the sci-fi-horror
genre and the second sci-fi-epic; and I heard fairly positive things about
the video game Escape from Butcher Bay as well. But that said, I didn't
have any particular intention to go see the new movie, Riddick, until
well after the (mixed) reviews started coming in. And I'm happy I went,
because this is a solid, medium-budget action-sci-fi movie.

The film generally has three parts. The first part shows the titular
Riddick struggling to survive on a hostile planet upon which he has been
left for dead; this is a mostly-silent affair, with regular threats and
montages and the occasional cute puppy. This was the most "sci-fi" and
"acting" part of the movie, and was rather understated and interesting.
It could have gotten boring, but it didn't outstay its welcome.

The second part of the film brings down the rest of the cast, two crews of
bounty hunters that have come to kill Riddick, but turn out to be stalked
and taunted by Riddick instead. This is familiar ground for many an
action movie, and it was fairly well implemented. The characters were
distinct and (mostly) plausible, the dialogue was simple but generally
amusing, and the knowledge that this was only part of the movie gave it an
interesting focus, since we didn't have to see every character die.

The third part has everybody that's still alive struggling to survive as
the planet's ecosystem turns on them - basically, Pitch Black again.
This was perfectly serviceable sci-fi-horror, and I have fairly little to
say about it. It fits in well with the other parts, and it again ends
before we have the time to get bored with it. That's all I could hope
for.

My biggest gripe had to do with how Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) was handled.
While it was refreshing to have a woman (lesbian!) sniper bad-ass in
amongst the standard mercenary-bad-ass crews, the writers still used the
excuse to treat her as a sexual object, and only occasionally to good
effect. Sure, it was nice to see her turn the tables (read: punch) on
those trying to harass her the first couple of times; but did we really
have to see a rape attempt get so far?

(For that matter, did we really need to have the rape attempt at all?
If the goal was to show us how despicable the attempted-rapist was, we
had already had this shown to us earlier in the film, and we were shown
this again just a few minutes later; did we really need a full three
this-character-has-to-die crimes? Sheesh.

I'll admit, I was less bothered by Riddick himself treating her as a
sexual object. Not only did the banter make some sense in context, but he
didn't actually "turn her straight", even though that's what the banter
was about, and I saw no particular impression that he wanted to. I'm
chalking this up to the fact that Riddick is meant to be an ass, more
Conan than John Carter of Mars. Anyway, digression over.)

In short, this was a perfectly solid sci-fi-horror movie. The plot was
simple and nothing special, the special effects were perfectly adequate,
the characters were fine, the connection to the franchise was virtually
non-existent, and the aliens were striking enough. I'll probably see the
next sequel if/when it ever comes.

Rating: 6 (out of 10)

Trailer thoughts: the trailers before the main movie clearly understood
that this was a sci-fi action adventure, but were otherwise nothing
horribly memorable. There were two stand-out trailers:

Next year's Robocop remake. This was a stylish trailer, showing the
new look and design while contrasting it directly with the original;
and it had Samuel L Jackson talking, which is a plus. But it was also
a "give us the whole plot" trailer. Still, it wasn't so bad as these
things go, and it did the job of making me at least somewhat interested
in a year's worth of marketing. 6/10 for the trailer.

Gravity. I was decidedly unimpressed with the teaser trailer for
this movie, but this was much better, even though this full-length
trailer is essentially just a longer version of that teaser from the
other character's POV (Sandra Bullock instead of George Clooney). I
think that the difference was that they had a chance to acknowledge
my concerns before: yes, of course they don't stand a chance. I now
intend to see this movie. 7/10.